slogging through stripping

I've been slowing picking at the paint stripping on the third floor for the past 6 months, specifically in the big bedroom that will at some point be Toren's.  The walls have been plastered for almost 2 years now, and the ongoing radiator drama was resolved this fall (which warrants a post of it's own).  I was trying to be reasonable and planned on just repainting the trim, but the paint in the room was in such poor condition due to all the water and lack of heating that there was no way it could be painted over.  And just a PSA, if one more person tells me either that private spaces and/or pine was painted in Victorians I'm going to cram my dental picks up their ass.  Every house is different.  My entire house had either shellacked or grained trim.  The second and third floors were entirely shellacked pine.  Please don't use these supposed rules to justify painting trim.  This room's trim is far less detailed than the rest of the house, so heat gunning was almost a pleasure.  Of course, the devil's in the details, so it's still slow going....

Once the trim is sanded I'll move on to painting the walls, ceiling and floor (restoring the sashes will wait till warm weather).  The last paint scheme that was completed was mint walls with peach doors and trim, perhaps some time in the 50's.  It would have been charming were it not for the room collapsing around it. And this is where it gets complicated.  Like the rest of the house, all the rooms up here were fully papered (wall and ceilings) multiple times.  And the papers up here were pretty cool, and almost modern in their designs.  This room was papered with what appears to be a dogwood pattern on the walls, and a chrysanthemum pattern on the ceiling originally.

For all this time I had thought they were metallic inks on neutral grounds, but pulling down the peeling paper and crumbling plaster in the closet revealed another story altogether.  The dogwood paper appears to have originally been a mottled green/yellow with deep purple and rust metallic inks.  These have faded to beige and silver.  Urg.  As best I can tell, in the dark closet the sun didn't have a chance to bleach the inks.  The moral of the story is that I'm at an impasse in deciphering colors.  If I had a firm grip on the colors I would gladly reproduce them.  The beauty of these patterns is that I should be able to have them turned into a stencil, but again, it's a shame to put in all the hours stenciling the pattern while getting the colors wrong.

The best I could capture the actual colors...

Another wrench in the plan is that this will be a boy's room.  And perhaps it's a bit unfair to smother him in flowers.  Which is why I'm considering using the second ceiling paper instead...

I know, it's very mod.  But trust me, it's a very early paper.  Those Victorians were just ahead of their time, and my Victorian's Victorians had exceptionally good taste!  This layer was never added to the closet, so I have no way of gauging the actual colors.  Normally I'd just assume it was some variation of cream and silver, but I now know that's not necessarily the case.  At this point the plan is to keep the walls a fairly neutral greenish taupe, the floor a deep teal, with a light tan stenciled ceiling - all chosen so as to not compete with the restored Queen Anne windows.  But as always, I'm open to suggestions.

all hail technology

I know I just expressed my relative disinterest in technology, but then I came across this.

https://glowforge.com/

I will be buying one, just not the first version.  It can etch glass for stained glass panels.  It can engrave leather to replace my one of a kind lincrusta.  I can carve wood for moldings.  I don't have words for how giddy this makes me.  Especially since Lincrusta in England estimated it would be 20,000 pounds just to carve a new roller (if they were even willing to do it).

So yeah, technology is pretty cool after all....

Maybe they'll send me one because I'm a blogger.  I bet I could beta test the shit out of it.

that smell...

I had all but forgotten that distinct smell that goes along with replastering.  While the curing plaster has it's own delicious scent (the scent of progress and victory could never be called bad could it?) there's also the residual scents of demolition.  Musty rotted wood, urine soaked soaked squirrel nests, even the old plaster has a smell.  Of course, overlaid on top of those is the sweet smell of fabric softener if I've been stripping wallpaper.  All that, and there's no possible way of opening a window in this cold...

That somewhat dizzying potpourri is worth it though if that's what getting walls requires.




























The butler's pantry is about half done, all that's left is patching the old holes.  You can see just how many types of plaster we have going on - three coat will go back on the lathe where possible, blue board and wire lathe are used in spots where there's no wood lathe left, or where he'll have to taper the plaster to blend two different surfaces.  Not to mention the veneer coat on the new surfaces.

It's a process that tries my patience, as part as our heavily negotiated price, the work is getting done on weekends and on some evenings.  While this was our choice, it still manages to drive me slightly nuts.

Upstairs, my to-do list is complete.  The only wallpaper remaining is on the ceiling of the big bedroom.  Since the plaster is in hideous shape, the ceiling and slanted walls will be laminated with blue board and veneer plaster, the fantastic ceiling papers can stay to enthrall a future owner.  While they appear strikingly modern, they are the first and second layers of about 15 total, so I have no doubt they date to about 1886 and 1911 respectively (first and second owners).  While I doubt it'll ever be in my budget to have these reproduced as wallpaper, I'm hoping to have a stencil made - time I have plenty of.

A lot of people ask why laminate instead of just demoing everything fully, and there are a few reasons (as much as I'd like to preserve every fraction of an inch height wise).  First off, the existing plaster is about an inch thicker than the half inch blue board, this would leave a difficult to patch gap where the walls meet the ceilings .  Secondly, our joists and studs are only a few steps removed from being trees, wonderful for holding the house up, terrible if you're looking for a flat surface - the plaster and lathe hides these inconsistencies, blue board secured directly to the joists would not.  The fix for this is to strike a level line around the rooms and screw level nailers into the joists - costly, time consuming, and likely taking away that inch of height you were fighting to preserve.  Lastly, while veneer plaster looks and feels nice, it still has that hollowness that drywall has, securing it against the plaster walls makes it nearly indistinguishable from the original.  Oh, and one more thing, I don't need a hundred more trash bags to deal with - we're already two months out with our current collection (between ours and our neighbors houses we can get rid of about 6-8 a week - Pittsburgh doesn't have a dump).

well, hello there...

My melancholy mood. brought on by nearing the end of scraping the wallpaper from all these old walls, was relieved by one last surprise today.

Waiting to make my acquaintance on one of the last walls I've worked on was a self-portrait of a little girl, initialed M.K.  I can only guess that this is Mildred Kelly, only child of our house's original owner, John G. Kelly, and future wife of Robert King (of the King Estate, Baywood).  She hasn't been alone on the wall all these years though, there are other profiles and initials on this section, although who they might be I don't know.

A.S.

E.S.

Cousins, workers, maids?  I have no idea.  Hopefully we'll encounter more names as our research continues.  For now I just hope we can save this section of wall before it crumbles away.
 

the drawings are on the small wall to the right of the chimney wall

I'm grateful for this discovery, in this room, as this room was home to another huge drawing on the plaster which was destroyed by our electrician before I stripped the wallpaper - the only evidence being the outer edges of sketched hills on either side of a gaping hole.  What it could have been will haunt me.  

Of course, this isn't the only art we've found in the house.  Several rooms have sported sketches of room outlines and molding profiles.  The best however, and one in a series of strange coincidences that gave rise to our house's name, is found near the floor of the guest bedroom.

the tower room

We've been bouncing around with several different projects over the past few weeks.  Given the periodic torrential rains and such, it's been about 50/50 whether I'm inside or out.  During the showers (and overly sunny days too) I've been slowly putting the third floor tower room back together.  I started this over the winter, and since then have cleared the room, stripped the wallpaper from the walls and ceiling (only one more room to go!), reinstalled the storms (only ones in the house), demoed the bad plaster, repaired and insulated the eaves and begun completing the electrical.  With the lines in place I could finally start patching the walls.

victorian tower bedroom before...

wallpaper stripping begins

The whole third floor was inundated with water for years (decades?) from the failing roof flashing. This has obviously caused a number of issues with the plaster, everything from rotted lathe and plaster, to wholesale failure, broken keys and cracks.  All these issues mean I'm using every trick in the book for making repairs in this little room.  For holes, I typically do true three coat plaster, using wire lathe on top of the existing wood lathe to make sure things key properly.  I was lucky in that when we bought the house (and contents, mostly bags of trash) there was also a box of expanded corner lathe, which when flattened out is perfect for patching these smaller holes (using several overlapping pieces instead of trying to cut a piece from a large razor sharp sheet).

This room only had a handful of spots that lent themselves to this though, the slanted ceilings were too much for this self-taught plasterer to handle, so I used 1/4 inch drywall instead (also came with the house, and using it seems to be easier than throwing it away), taping the joints on the first pass, and I'll fill in the rest on the second pass (I use 90 minute durabond for the first coat, and premixed to smooth it out on the second pass).

In spots where the whole wall came down we used half inch blueboard, and will do two coat veneer plaster over it, again using durabond to bed the tape.

That's great stuff foam filling the gaps in the cornice

When possible (it wasn't in this case) I like to leave the lathe behind the blueboard - while the veneer plaster looks excellent, it has the same hollow feeling as drywall if there isn't a solid surface behind it.  This knee wall was interesting to work on, it turns out the dividing wall between the two rooms (now covered in old rock lathe) had been moved a foot forward at some point, this necessitated sliding the blue board through the gap where the walls met into the next room, as there were no studs to fasten it to.

Last but not least, I've been trying my hand at repairing the cracks and loose plaster.  The first year we owned the house I tried plaster washers, which were junk as far as I'm concerned.  Since then I've either ignored the problem, taped the crack, or just opened up the bad spot and did a standard repair.  Since seeing others use Big Wally's Plaster Magic I thought I would try it, until I saw the price...  To do the work required in this house would likely require several hundred bucks, which is just not an option.  Instead, I figured I'd try it using materials we already had on hand, pink plaster bonder, construction adhesive and fender washers.  So far my results are mixed, although admittedly I likely didn't vacuum the holes on the first pass adequately as I was afraid of pulling the plaster off the wall.  

If you're curious about the process, here's someone's tutorial which is more or less the same thing I'm doing.  Once I get more sections done I'll talk more about it, and well, if Big Wally's wants to send me some of theirs I'll gladly do a side by side comparison...

I swear my walls aren't bleeding...

peepshow

The heat gun has been the tool of choice for the past few days, but I haven't yet reached a point that's worth writing about, so we'll talk about the paint scraper instead.  This winter has been terrible in many respects, and the incredible and prolonged dryness has done a number on things like our woodwork and paint.

Most of the first floor got a quick paint job with gloss white (walls/ceiling/woodwork) some point before it was listed for sale.  None of the walls were prepped (they were covered with grime and wallpaper paste), and no primer was used, which, paired with the stresses of construction and habitation has resulted in paint cracking and flaking.  I won't complain, it all needs to be stripped anyway, and doing so has revealed some pleasant surprises.

This section of paint was helped by a massive leak from when we started reconnecting radiators.  It reveals that there was some decorative painting on the ceiling, bordered by some sort of trim (we can see the patched nail holes) and likely wallpaper over the cove which would have extended to the picture rail (also long gone).  The brown of the ceiling is somewhat of a conundrum as the original section of the dining room ceiling above the now-bathroom's dropped ceiling appeared to be navy blue with a painted mosaic pattern around the edges (pictures were on the stolen camera, and the drop ceiling has since been patched).  The brown that was revealed may just be the background of the mosaic, I'll need to open up another section to know for sure.  

Of course this just piqued my curiosity about our other first floor ceilings (all those on the second and third were originally wallpapered).  The current entry room/library has 1/4 inch drywall up, so that will remain a mystery.  I can tell that the cove of the molding in there was wallpapered since the adhesive was still there after I scraped the paint away.  The old entry was mostly gutted when the house was converted into apartments, so I doubt anything would have survived if even the plaster moldings were removed.  The section of molding that was clinging to life above the added closet was painted a bronzy green.

That leaves the (used to be) front parlor/living room.  

Mind you, this room faces west, and gets the most spectacular sunsets - those Victorians really knew their stuff.  Can you imagine how the room would light up with the ceilings and moldings painted out like that?  Gorgeous, and they will be again.  The problem I'm running into in here is that it appears that there was decorative painting done in that darker pink color across the ceiling, but it's being pulled off by the white paint.  We have another non-original closet in this room that has a dropped ceiling, so I knocked a hole in the wall above where the ceiling was dropped.  I had hoped the ceiling was in it's original state, sadly, all I got was some teens or twenty's wallpaper and beige paint...

lovely leafy paper, but no orange paint to be seen

So this means that this room had already been redecorated by the time the house was split up.  It's likely that this was done by the second owners (Escher), who were also responsible for some other lovely arts and craft papers in the house.    What this 4 foot section of wall does reveal is that it is original, and has intact molding which is important to know for when we take out the closet.  The opening you seen to the right is above the ceiling of the first floor bath (carved from equal parts of the dining room and living room).

Luckily the paint on that section is peeling too, so maybe it won't take off quite as much of the original paint when I go to strip it.  Stripping it will have to wait however, because those last two pictures?  Taken by sticking the camera into the little black hole above the door frame below...

what's black and blue and sooty all over?

That'd be me folks.

Now I know house restoration is rumored to be quite the glamorous pastime, but let me tell you, I don't have enough makeup in this house to cover-up the bruises.  These aren't accidentally hitting myself with a hammer bruises, these are deliberately crawling into places I don't fit bruises.  While the goal of closing up the third floor suggests that the holes will get smaller, the fact is most needed to get a lot bigger first.

Our third floor is quite spacious, with two large bedrooms, two smaller bedrooms and a nice sized bath, hallway and linen cabinet.  Although all the rooms have 9 foot ceilings, they are still tucked in under the eaves which gives them charming sloped ceilings.  Under these slopes however, the darkness lurks.  Rot, squirrel, mouse and raccoon nests (and droppings naturally), destructive stop gap repairs, moldy insulation, and a century of soot and cobwebs and silver cream pitchers.

Let this be a lesson to you that when you're sitting on the floor scraping wallpaper with construction cat in your lap and the inexplicable urge to stick your hand in a hole and take a picture overwhelms you, listen, for it is the will of the House Gods.  This little creamer must have been in a box in the attic that was knocked over, and it rolled down the sloped ceiling into the knee wall next to the chimney.  The most amusing part of the find was the mouse nest that was inside of it, complete with evidence that said mouse had a bit of a nibble of his new abode. Actually, that's a lie.  The most hilarious part is that while I made the hole big enough to get in, it wasn't quite big enough to get back out again.  Naturally the trained monkey was several states away at the time, and I nearly resorted to sending an SOS to a friend across the street who has our key (I had, in a stroke of lazy brilliance brought my phone in with me since I was too euphoric to go looking for a flashlight)!  Some momentary panic, and some forceful rearranging of ribs, and I managed to extricate myself.  Sadly, it's not the first time, nor will it be the last.

the hole in question

Lucifer Sam - the construction cat

Other than that it's been a week of cleaning and clearing.  We've already thrown away about 20 bags of scraped wallpaper, old insulation, rotted wood and plaster etc...

see those plywood shelves in the dormer?

they didn't put up much of a fight...

The worst though has been pulling out the nests - 3 contractor bags full - the smell and dust and reaching blind into deep dark places had been some of the worst work I've done in recent memory.  Also, I've yet to find a single stick of wood up here that hasn't been clawed or chewed into pleasing (and no longer structural) curves.

Almost clean!

We've insulated and spray foamed the larger gaps, reinforced the rot and squirrel damage, and done some electrical work.  Assuming we can get the blueboard up the stairs we should begin the process of putting things back together soonishly...

white walker

Well, the red rimmed blue eyes and white pallor can only mean one thing - the walls have been patched and sanded in the once-was-closet. I had intended to take copious pictures of the process, but really, what can I say that hasn't been said a hundred times before. Despite what many contractors would have you believe, patching walls is not rocket science. When we bought the house, huge sections of the walls and ceilings were on the floor, and more came down as we rewired and repaired our radiators. I was told by everyone I spoke to that I could never learn to plaster well enough to make repairs, and that if I was going to DIY it I should just rip it all down and drywall. Bleh. I hate drywall nearly as much as I hate vinyl and the color white. So I read the Petch House blog, and the Dept. of the Interior Preservation Briefs, and I plastered. And it turns out I'm not half bad at it, although issues with my joints prevent me from holding a hawk and large trowel.

That said, the sections of the closet were so small, and I was on such a time crunch that we decided not to three coat it in this case (plaster would have been three days, plus a week or two cure time before paint. First I stripped the wallpaper, I use a couple of different scrapers and fabric softener and hot water in a spray bottle (about a 1:6 ratio). The fabric softener has done more to remove the abandoned house smell than any other thing I've done. I spray and just keep everything damp as it penetrates - in rooms like this with painted paper, scoring it is definitely helpful. After that's clean and dry I wash off the residue with TSP, hot water, and a green scrubby. Strip wallpaper before repairing plaster, I can guarantee you'll need to repair more than it looks like at first glance.

painted wallpaper

After everything's dry I clean out all the rotted plaster from the holes with a 5 in 1. I go down to the lathe (and clear out the plaster from between them) in any section that's not just delamination of the finish coat. Once the worst of the crumbles has been conquered I dab on plasterweld to the lath and inside edges of the plaster, and wait for that to dry (the waiting is the main theme of any plaster repair). For this repair I didn't have any holes larger than 5"x5" (and the square ceiling batch was nearly flush with 1/4 inch drywall), so I went with durabond. Holes bigger than 3"x3" get wire lathe screwed into them (you can also use blue board or drywall in larger holes, which I did in the ceiling patch), if there's not enough support for the wire lathe just add more wood lathe. I normally don't patch with drywall, but in this case there was an enormous old raccoon nest in the eaves that was oozing through the lath, I need to crawl into the third floor knee wall space to clear it out, but in the meantime I didn't want my plaster keys bonding to that disgusting mess, and blue board only comes in 1/2 inch, not 1/4 inch.

holes are cleaned out

first coats

final coat drying

Here's where things diverge from actual three coat work, in this case I just use durabond 90 as a base coat, building up thickness to just shy of flush (easy sand is a lie), and then finish with whatever joint compound you have laying around (I only use drywall tape for patches with board like the ceiling). Last but not least, remember how much you hate sanding the stuff and vow to do only plaster in the future (about the 100th time I've remembered this). On that note, after all my hard work to control the dust during demo, I started sanding with my ceiling fan still on high. Dust. Is. EVERYWHERE ...

picture is true to wall color,
sage green

color is true to the ambient light

None the less, we're sanded and painted, although stripping the trim and repairing that section of floor will wait till fall. At least working inside all day is a pleasure when it looks like this outside . . .

fog across the valley